1. Field
The technology of the present application relates generally to erasing memory for wireless devices, and more specifically to systems, methods, and apparatuses for hard erasing memory on wireless devices when a threat or inappropriate access or attempted access is possible.
2. Background
Wireless devices and, in particular, cellular telephones are ubiquitous today. Cellular telephones, for example, are no longer simply devices to provide voice communication between individuals, but are now powerful processing devices. Cellular telephones, for example, may be used to store and process data. Cellular telephone or cell phone is used interchangeably with wireless device herein, but a wireless device is not limited to cellular telephones and may include other wireless devices, such as, for example, desktop computers, laptop computers, handheld computers, electronic games, portable digital assistants, MP3 players, DVD players, or the like.
With the increase in processing and storage capacity of cellular telephones, people have begun to store personal, sensitive, and sometimes embarrassing information on their cellular telephones or wireless devices. The information may include, for example, banking information, personal health information, pictures, video clips, contact lists, credit card information, and the like.
While keeping personal and sensitive information on cellular telephones is convenient, it causes some issues. Some cellular telephones are lost or stolen. Moreover, cellular telephones are frequently sold on secondary markets. Thus, deleting personal, sensitive, and embarrassing information is necessary.
Using conventional techniques, erasing information from memory involves indicating to the processor that the memory space is free to receive new information from a write (or a read/write) module. However, the data remains stored in memory until the write module writes new information to the memory space. Thus, in other words, only the pointer to the data is erased and the data remains stored in memory. For convenience, deleting the pointer but not the data is referred to as a “soft erase”. Some companies have begun addressing this problem by allowing the owner or user of the cellular telephone to “hard erase” telephones. Hard erase in this application means indicating to the processor the memory space is available as well as actively replacing the data in the memory space with new data. The new data may be a predefined data series or random data.
Currently, some cellular telephones provide mechanisms for initiating a hard erase protocol. For example, one mechanism requires entering a password on the device. By entering the password, the device initiates the hard erase protocol. The password may be input directly from the cellular telephone or transmitted to the telephone from a separate location using a conventional wireless data protocol. Other cellular devices accomplish hard erasing by keystrokes or other predefined protocols.
Although some mechanisms for hard erasure of data stored in cellular telephone memory are available, it would be desirous to provide improved systems, methods, and apparatuses for hard erasing memory in cellular and other wireless devices.